Researching

This morning, in church, my daughter held the bank note that I'd just given her to place into the collection plate and peered at it, holding it up to the light. After the usher had left, I asked her what she had been doing. She told me that she was looking at the image embedded in the pager. I told her that was called a 'watermark', and she asked why it had that name. I didn't know, and just a few minutes ago I looked it up. Interesting stuff, and once again Google came through. Like lots of others, I use it all the time for stray nits of information.

For example, on my benighted work laptop I'd trying to install a new telecom package. Not going well. I noticed that one of the meaningless detailed error messages was 'Failed Rule 1'. Sure, I thought, 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia'... No, wait.....so I looked it up... As it happened, I didn't find it, but I found lots of sites which used that phrase, including one on a web page for something called 'Project Euclid' listing an article from the Advances in Applied Probability journal . The article, written by Kalyan Chatterjee and Susan H. Xu, details the actions of ' myopic, memoryless agents'... I didn't read it -- a) they charge $6 if you're not a member of the publishing society, and b) I'm not all that conversant with more than the very basic concepts of probability -- but doesn't that sound fascinating? 'Myopic, memoryless ' - man, I know people like that!